Doug Stephen is Politely Peeved

Irish designer/developer David O’Brien created an absolutely wonderful series of videos on using Quartz Composer as a mockup tool for interactive comps.

Quartz Composer is a tool for creating animations and interactivity that can be treated as a standalone Quicktime entity or embedded in OS X Cocoa applications (sadly, not in Cocoa Touch). I’ve heard of people using it for prototyping and comping designs before but I’d never used the stuff myself; I’d never really understood what exactly I would get out of learning to use the tool until I saw these tutorials.

Dave’s tutorial is rooted in the fact that Facebook’s designers used Quartz Composer themselves to prototype Facebook Home (see the subheading “You don’t design something like Facebook Home using Photoshop”). After watching all of these videos, I can easily see myself creating future mockups for small apps or sites using Quartz Composer; I can even see myself using it as a great tool for crafting awesome presentations. Definitely worth the hour or so it takes to get through all 5 videos.

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